Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment
Check out this poem sampler the editors of the Poetry Foundation have provided. Some of the usual suspects are there, of course, but look further to find Danez Smith’s “Tonight in Oakland,” Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War,” Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought,” and much more.
More poetry! More resistance!
Portrait in Ash
In summer, sweet crushed ice, and crickets pulsing through the night.
Brake lights, and always the blurred memory of nicotine.
I recall running through the glow, laughing, fingers splayed forward,
and the ensuing sharp admonishment.
Steel, flint and spark. Blackened linings and diminishment.
How many washings must one endure to accept an indelible soiling?
In retrospect, your body still resists.
Lovely smoke uncoiling towards the moon, residue of impurities
and substance. Desire, freed and returning.
You dwell underground. I gaze at the cloud-marred sky.
* * *
“Portrait in Ash” appears in Interval’s Night, a mini-digital chapbook, available for free download from Platypus Press.
I’d thought to write a brief post on the landay, but in this 2013 piece Jamie Dedes has surpassed anything I could offer.
پاس په كمر ولاړه ګله!
نصيب دچايي اوبه زه درخيژومه
O Flower that you grow on the mountain side;
The duty to water you belongs to me, but to whom would you belong?ستا به د ګلو دوران تير شۍ
زما به پاته شۍ دزړه سوۍ داغونه
The blooming season of your beauty will pass;
But the scorched patches on my heart will always remain fresh.
Zarmina’s parents at her grave. She was a poet who died after setting herself on fire. Photo by Seasmus Murphy, 2012, Courtesy of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Last week The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, announced the publication of the June 2013 issue, Landays. The issue is dedicated entirely to poetry composed by and circulated among Afghan women.
After learning the story of a teenage girl, Zarmina, who was forbidden to write poems and burned herself in protest…
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If we don’t seek, how will we learn?
The Academy of American Poets is offering a series, curated by 2016 Walt Whitman winner Mai Der Vang, featuring poems by and discussions with Hmong American poets.
Our country is enriched by its great diversity, yet we too often passively accept only what comes to us. Read these poets. Listen to their words. This is who they are. Who we are.
Awakened, He Turns to the Wall (Cento)
Then, everything slept.
Where were you before the day?
You see here the influence of inference,
whereby things might be seen in another light,
as if the trees were not indifferent, as if
a hand had suddenly erased a huge
blackboard, only, I thought there was
something even if I call it nothing,
like the river stretching out on its
deathbed. No one jumps off.
* * *
A cento is composed of lines from poems by other poets. This originated from pieces by: Larry Levis, Jacques Roubaud, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Spires, William Bronk, Vicente Huidobro, Ingebord Bachmann
For further information and examples of the form, you might peruse the Academy of American Poets site: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-cento
My poem, “A Brief History of Babel,” is up at Bonnie McClellan’s International Poetry Month Celebration. She’ll be presenting 28 poems following this year’s theme of “Neural Networks: The Creative Power of Language.” It’s going to be a fun, interesting month.
O at the Edges 